Major Marcus Laird knows first-hand the benefits that can come with applying skills and knowledge from a civilian career into challenges encountered while performing his reserve military mission.

Laird is an intelligence officer at the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground Systems site in Beale Air Force Base, California. The site receives, processes, exploits, distributes data from Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance sensors and delivers direct support to the Joint Forces Commander via a network of distributed operations. This site is recognized as the Air Force’s primary ISR planning and direction, collection, processing and exploitation, analysis and dissemination weapon system.

He leveraged his extensive supply chain management and human factors an

alysis background from his civilian career in order to evaluate the imagery process during a critical deployment.

Laird was part of a team tasked with monitoring polling stations during the Afghanistan elections. A delay in imagery processing and analysis created a significant backlog of decision-quality imagery to the Joint Warfighter customers. He identified multiple human-in-the-loop process inefficiencies which led to overwhelming hours spent in product rework. In less than 48 hours he was able to cut exploitation times from twenty-seven hours after time-over-target down to one and a half hours.